Biography

Helen Moffett

Featured Poem:

Route 62

Featured Poem:

Route 62

What do mountains dream of?
Lying slumbering in the sheet of heat
Smoothed gently across the Little Karoo.
No wind. Only warmth, but it doesn’t press.
It floats, tenderly draping the spines and ribs
Into which history has folded these ranges.
Raging hormones of the earth’s adolescence
Blasted entire continents into the sky
Leaving the remnants to drift down and lie
Locked into peace, immobile, their flanks
Not even twitching in the drowsy summer
Afternoons. Now they breathe in time with
The slowly passing centuries of geology’s clock,
The beat too deep to resonate in our bones.
But the mountains hear it in their sleep:
Tick, and then the pause: aeons later, tock

What do mountains dream of?
Lying slumbering in the sheet of heat
Smoothed gently across the Little Karoo.
No wind. Only warmth, but it doesn’t press.
It floats, tenderly draping the spines and ribs
Into which history has folded these ranges.
Raging hormones of the earth’s adolescence
Blasted entire continents into the sky
Leaving the remnants to drift down and lie
Locked into peace, immobile, their flanks
Not even twitching in the drowsy summer
Afternoons. Now they breathe in time with
The slowly passing centuries of geology’s clock,
The beat too deep to resonate in our bones.
But the mountains hear it in their sleep:
Tick, and then the pause: aeons later, tock

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Biography

Helen Moffett is a freelance writer, editor, academic and poet, whose lectured as far afield as Trinidad and Alaska. Her academic writings include a great deal of gloomy but necessary work on sexual violence in the post-apartheid context. She writes about cricket because it reminds her why she likes men (and because she loves the game with a passion).

She has also published a university textbook on poetry, an anthology of South African landscape writing and several short stories. Poetry is her first and last love, she went from teaching it to students to eventually writing her own. Her debut collection of poems, Strange Fruit, was published by Modjaji Books in 2009.

Helen Moffett

Biography

Helen Moffett is a freelance writer, editor, academic and poet, whose lectured as far afield as Trinidad and Alaska. Her academic writings include a great deal of gloomy but necessary work on sexual violence in the post-apartheid context. She writes about cricket because it reminds her why she likes men (and because she loves the game with a passion).

She has also published a university textbook on poetry, an anthology of South African landscape writing and several short stories. Poetry is her first and last love, she went from teaching it to students to eventually writing her own. Her debut collection of poems, Strange Fruit, was published by Modjaji Books in 2009.

Featured Poem:

Route 62

Featured Poem:

Route 62

What do mountains dream of?
Lying slumbering in the sheet of heat
Smoothed gently across the Little Karoo.
No wind. Only warmth, but it doesn’t press.
It floats, tenderly draping the spines and ribs
Into which history has folded these ranges.
Raging hormones of the earth’s adolescence
Blasted entire continents into the sky
Leaving the remnants to drift down and lie
Locked into peace, immobile, their flanks
Not even twitching in the drowsy summer
Afternoons. Now they breathe in time with
The slowly passing centuries of geology’s clock,
The beat too deep to resonate in our bones.
But the mountains hear it in their sleep:
Tick, and then the pause: aeons later, tock

What do mountains dream of?
Lying slumbering in the sheet of heat
Smoothed gently across the Little Karoo.
No wind. Only warmth, but it doesn’t press.
It floats, tenderly draping the spines and ribs
Into which history has folded these ranges.
Raging hormones of the earth’s adolescence
Blasted entire continents into the sky
Leaving the remnants to drift down and lie
Locked into peace, immobile, their flanks
Not even twitching in the drowsy summer
Afternoons. Now they breathe in time with
The slowly passing centuries of geology’s clock,
The beat too deep to resonate in our bones.
But the mountains hear it in their sleep:
Tick, and then the pause: aeons later, tock